Ted Patrick’s FXWidget
Official Flex/AIR evangelist, Ted Patrick, has put together a simplified generated template project for Flex components (called FXWidget) in an attempt to make it easier to use flex as page-components rather than full applications. It includes the SWFObject library from Geoff Stearns and reduces the line count in the out-of-the-box index.template.html file from 108 to a mere 26. It’s far from complete, but a definite step in the right direction.
I’ve put together an extension of this library to add some more functionality and to restore the browser-history feature of flex that is included in the original template file. In my extensions, I’ve side-stepped the IE7 issues people were having in relation to loading the SWF in a script tag by loading it by preloading it through prototype.js’s Ajax.Request method and used an onComplete closure to trigger the loading of the SWF object. I have yet to add deep-linking back to the template (Flex3).
This marks my first contribution back to the Flex community, to which I hope to contribute as much as I can. My updates this site have been… well there just hasn’t been any for a while. I’ve been “heads-down” programming at my new job since December, up to my eyeballs in Flex and FDS. Things are settling down now, so I hope to have more time to share what I’ve learned.
Click here to download the Flex2 project.
Click here to see the output examples.
Good work, Ted!
